What does Palantir actually do?

https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-what-the-company-does/

by mudil • 11 months ago

378 348 11 months ago

wkat4242• 11 months ago

Palantir’s employees are also sometimes called “hobbits.” According to one former employee, a common internal motto in Palantir’s early days was “Save the Shire,” a reference to the hobbit homeland, which they say was a rallying cry that reflected the company’s ethos at the time.

this seems so delusional and divorced from the source material that i sometimes wonder if any of these people are familiar with it at all.

edit to clarify:

"They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools."

psunavy03• 11 months ago

Or you could try to understand why they would think this way, and perhaps get an understanding of how people you utterly disagree with reason and think.

GuinansEyebrows4• 11 months ago

i'm not talking about whether i think palantir or its employees are good or bad.

"They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools." - Concerning Hobbits

The Scouring Of The Shire is the account of anti-industrial direct action, for Iluvatar's sake.

grafmax• 11 months ago

Being willing to use any means necessary means to fight your enemies - building software to support mass surveillance, genocide, and concentration camps - means you’re no longer fighting for moral principles - you’re fighting for power. In that regard I do think a closer reading of the source material does have something to teach these people.

thrown-08254• 11 months ago

Peter Thiel is a an authoritarian loser and Tolkien would have hated his guts.

therobots927• 11 months ago

I think he is more than aware of the fact that he’s the villain in this story. The kool-aid drinking employees of his portfolio companies on the other hand are a different story…

yepguy• 11 months ago

Well Thiel did name his company after an artifact of evil in the LOTR universe.

I love Tolkien but using his name in political discussions is pointless. He was basically an anarchist whose views wouldn't support any major active political faction today.

qaq2• 11 months ago

Palantir is a consulting shop that positions itself as a tech company

Duhck• 11 months ago

Yes, but...

They also have one of the most profitable business models the world has ever seen. Their RPE (revenue per employee) is roughly $1mm and growing at a 50% YoY rate...

They heavily use technology as leverage for insane margin growth. 90% rule of 40 as well.

elliotto• 11 months ago

Yeah turns out leeching off the surveillance state makes heaps of money. Great business model

qaq2• 11 months ago

and yet they made a monstorus 214 mil in Q1 and Accenture Plc: $2.2 billion

cowpig• 11 months ago

How much of their revenue is from government contracts?

Is their profitable business model based on the fact that they're good at enabling & profiting from authoritarianism and corruption?

throwforfeds• 11 months ago

Their RPE (revenue per employee) is roughly $1mm and growing at a 50% YoY rate...

Meanwhile OnlyFans is at something like $30mm per employee, which is wild.

anon191928• 11 months ago

$1MM is nothing if you compare that to Valve or Hyperliquid.

so yeah not the top of chain

Temporary_313373• 11 months ago

Have you looked at companies such as Jane's? Overall bigger market cap and RPE orders of magintude higher - don't fall for hype like everyone else, or at least check the numbers before saying 'most profitable', they are not even close.

oinfoalgo2• 11 months ago

They also are one of the most overvalued companies of all time right now.

The business model was completely stagnating before LLMs.

They are cashing in on the rush for large firms to wrangle data for LLMs but the entire concept of large firms and FDE has obvious scaling issues.

insane_dreamer3• 11 months ago

Yeah basically like Deloitte or BCG but with better, well paid engineers (instead of trying to outsource everything overseas to save $)

some_furry• 11 months ago

If you want to know what Palantir actually does, ask its critics.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/survei...

ianks• 11 months ago

I’d be curious to hear a follow-up article about what Palantir doesn’t do. For better or worse, I think we are living in a time where companies should take principled stands about anti-features.

It’s good to build in all of these optional data and privacy knobs, but I fear that’s not enough.

hatthew• 11 months ago

TFA mentions the most important points, which are that Palantir doesn't provide any data or act on any data.

Lammy• 11 months ago

They sell the capability to do this on a global scale: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

jmclnx• 11 months ago

From the article

What it’s ultimately selling them is not just software, but the idea of a seamless, almost magical solution to complex problems

Sound like to me all it does is funnel our tax dollars to the top 1%.

They seem to be involved with the project below. So I cannot help to believe these people with Trump's Admin. is a massive corruption operation on steroids.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-unraveling-two-pentagon...

No wonder the deficit is expanding.

LearnYouALisp3• 11 months ago

WASHINGTON, Aug 13 (Reuters) - ...to cancel two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined [for HR systems]...
The reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including Salesforce and billionaire Peter Thiel's Palantir, to have a chance to win similar projects, which could amount to a costly do-over, according to seven sources familiar with the matter.

"To have a chance"?!

Exodus 23:8 ESV And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the clear-sighted and subverts the cause of those who are in the right.

yunwal• 11 months ago

Ok so like what does Palantir actually do?

From what I understand Palantir is basically a data consulting company with a suite of data mining/visualization tools at its core. Essentially, it sends an engineer armed with these tools into the customer organization’s various disparate databases, funnels all that data to one tool, and then gives you some nice graphs or whatever.

IMO it’s mostly bullshit, which is why they make all their customers sign ndas. I’ve still never met anyone who worked with them that could tell me any significant value they brought.

jinushaun• 11 months ago

Sounds like a lot of government contractors.

thrown-08254• 11 months ago

What do you think DOGE was for?

stephencoyner• 11 months ago

I’d recommend watching any of the AIP demos given by customers. The commercial customers seem to be quite open about what they do with the tech

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmKm_LhXXgqRbNwHCSD4Wb-lI...

saagarjha4• 11 months ago

I don't think the commercial customers are representative of the kinds of services that Palantir offers.

peroids• 11 months ago

If anyone wants inside info on what they actually dm me, I have to work with their products and can probably give you all the dirt

Tiberium• 11 months ago

HN doesn't have DMs :)

mgh22• 11 months ago

Article: > "Got a Tip? Are you a current or former Palantir employee who wants to talk about what's happening? We'd like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at carolinehaskins.61."

jpfromlondon• 11 months ago

seems like a trap.

neilv• 11 months ago

Don't do this.

Use Wikipedia to vet the close connections of whatever news outlet you were considering, and stop vetting only once you realize that you almost made a terrible mistake by talking to a reporter there.

Forget whatever dirt you think you know (it doesn't matter in the current political environment), donate your blood money to a good cause, and go do something you feel better about, but without stepping on the toes of the scariest people.

UltraSane2• 11 months ago

Is there software any good? By good I would use Splunk as a reference, which I consider very good.

htrp• 11 months ago

Palantir is a tech platform that consumes data from their clients in return for providing high level data-driven insights. They assign FDEs (or consultants) to really learn the details of a customers data. Foundry allows them to get single pane view of the data in an org and they actually have both the tech and engineering skills to do the dirty data cleaning jobs.

For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.

_boffin_• 11 months ago

had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.

so beautiful.

nemothekid• 11 months ago

For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.

AFAIK, this is the most succinct description of Palantir I've read. A looser-fitting analogy is they come in, replace whatever the hell you were trying to use SAP for with actually competent software. Most "FDEs" can't explain what the company does because what they did was work at $CLIENT for 18 months ripping apart all their internal software with Palantir building blocks.

gundmc• 11 months ago

It sounds like fundamentally SAP and Palantir target different use cases though? While SAP has OLAP functions, their bread and butter is highly domain-specific and transactional.

utilize1808• 11 months ago

So it's outsourced data science?

2d5200752• 11 months ago

Closer to outsourced data engineering

internetter• 11 months ago

yes, and they also make user interfaces for killing people

kccqzy• 11 months ago

Yes but if you don't have enough budget to pay for their engineering time, they also provide good UI to do data science. It's like a fancier version of Excel for data wrangling: imagine Excel but your data is not necessarily tabular; it may be a graph; it may contain images and multimedia, etc.

I once interviewed at Palantir and at the same they gave a demo of their software to every candidate.

johanneskanybal• 11 months ago

A bunch of dash boards, tools and ingestion yes.

Worked for a similar company with similar clients at the time. Making the data usefull in innovative ways was a big part of it so in a way sure part of it data science related. At the same time I’d say it’s broader than that.

mitchbob• 11 months ago

FDE = Forward Deployed Engineer

throwaway57522• 11 months ago

Forward Deployed Engineer = Consultant

I will not allow Palantir to extend their reality distortion field to me. They are consultants. They are also engineers. Other places call them FEs. But they didn't invent some new class of engineering, they just rebranded one.

sunrunner• 11 months ago

As opposed to the more commonly known 'Reverse Deployed Engineer', who sits behind the product manager who can deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to.

leobg3• 11 months ago

They take an exorbitant fee to clean up the mess government created when they outsourced their tech infrastructure to private sector companies preying on dumb government money.

That’s the thing with government: They always believe you can drown out problems with taxpayer money. They don’t get that what solves problems is never money, but competence, hard work, and having skin in the game.

jeltz2• 11 months ago

At least in my country the reason is that the politicians force them to outsource in various ways like not letting them pay their employees market rate salaries.

It is not that they believe more money will solve the problem. It is often cost cutting which makes things this expensive.

phatskat3• 11 months ago

That’s the thing with government: They always believe you can drown out problems with taxpayer money.

They know they can’t drown out the problems, nor do most of them want to. The privatization of government work is just a dog and pony show that lets rich assholes give taxpayer money to other rich assholes.

Not to say the left doesn’t do this too (assuming the US political speak, “left” referring to democrats is really just barely right of center), but part of the conservative playbook has always been to rip apart the federal government (or the parts that they don’t like, such as providing social services). The easiest way is to tank a group by hiring a private company to do a shit job and then saying “see how bad they did? We should just axe food stamps.”

2d5200752• 11 months ago

If by "you give them your data" you mean "your data never leaves your data warehouses and never touches a Palantir server", then you're close

samrus• 11 months ago

Their FDE embeds in your org yeah. Thats worth noting maybe, but not that novel

NalNezumi• 11 months ago

Another thing to add is (according to a coworker who worked with them at previous big company) that they present solutions in a way that makes it hard for the customer to use the solution outside their ecosystem.

They're supposedly very aggressive on that point, so once you integrate their solution to your pipeline you're pretty much stuck with them for the foreseeable future.

Many safety/mission critical companies can get really bogged in by this, with too many administrative hoops to detach. which is probably why they're focusing on that industry.

My coworker liked to describe them as a parasite that creates a symbiotic relationship with their host.

UltraSane2• 11 months ago

Best I have been able to determine is they use an in-house developed graph DB and ontologies and a lot of experience to link and analyze data in very powerful ways.

SJC_Hacker• 11 months ago

I highly suspect all these Big Data companies are consulting for Big Companies that are doing things that if the average citizen was aware of, would be absolutely horrified

Which is why they speak in business lingo / vague generalities and not give examples, its to hide the real intent

xenospn• 11 months ago

The average citizen cares about the cost of eggs and not much else.

next_xibalba2• 11 months ago

Upon what evidence are your suspicions based?

DrammBA• 11 months ago

Does suspicion require evidence?

radicaldreamer• 11 months ago

I don't think its all that sophisticated. The reason Palantir pairs up its services with consultants is that it's not that useful or sophisticated, the consultant's job is to spice it up so it seems like the data and tooling is more valuable than it actually is.

It's the same model as McKinsey etc, the value add is in feeling like you're getting value out of the money you're spending and half of that is being marketed to personally by the consultant and getting glossy presentations, reports, and dashboards.

_Algernon_2• 11 months ago

I thought McKinsey's reason to be was that they sold justification for unpopular decisions management already wants to make.

mieubrisse2• 11 months ago

The reason they pair it with consulting is because:

1. The products are powerful but complex, and were designed by smart, technical people for smart, technical people. They lack some random-person usability.

2. The average client employee isn't that technical.

Source: worked there for 7 years (my views are my own, of course)

mirzap• 11 months ago

Recently, I have been increasingly associating Palantir with the 'Samaritan' from Person of Interest, an evil entity monitoring everyone in the digital world, collecting data, and selling it to authoritarian regimes.

tamishungry• 11 months ago

such a great show!

fleaaa• 11 months ago

I've always associated Palantir with Dark Knight Sonar vision system. This one might be working better than the fictional one I suppose.

It's such a disgusting modern day leviathan, I roll my eyes to the back of my head when people casually say you should buy their stock

Henchman21• 11 months ago

Not the corrupted seeing-stones from LotR, eh? Do so few really understand that reference??

supercanuck• 11 months ago

I was joking with a friend that one of their competitive advantages is that it is a mediocre data platform but their critics get gang stalked.

raffael_de• 11 months ago

Given that the world is headed towards a surveillance dystopia and Peter Thiel being involved I think I should buy some stocks now. What happened end of 2024 that kicked off its price hike?

GloriousMEEPT• 11 months ago

Palantir donated millions to the Trump campaign and he won.

Hikikomori2• 11 months ago

Vance worked for Thiel and was funded by him. They're both friends with Curtis yarvin.

pesus2• 11 months ago

I'd be willing to bet they did much more than donate behind the scenes.

platevoltage• 11 months ago

I hope that's a rhetorical question.

mrguyorama• 11 months ago

What happened end of 2024 that kicked off its price hike?

Owning the vice president tends to look pretty damn good on a balance sheet. Especially when that admin is pretty openly running pump and dumps on wall street.

mgh22• 11 months ago

Mix of Trump winning, prospects for investing in ICE, policing, defense and AI hype

Another stock on this trend: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/axon-reports-q2-2025-revenue-...

FergusArgyll2• 11 months ago

Revenue growth of 20-40% a quarter EPS Growth of 100% a quarter

Earning beat after earning beat, increased guidance after increased guidance

dash2• 11 months ago

Maybe not... given its Price/Sales ratio, it's pricing in about 10 years of 30% growth. It's a great company (bracketing the ethics issue which has produced a lot of boring discussion here). But even a great company can be severely overvalued.

Put another way: if you buy, be very ready to sell fast, and very confident that you can gauge when a market turns.

jocaal• 11 months ago

Do you mind sharing how one goes from p/s to expected growth rate? Is it a rule of thumb?

throwaway422432• 11 months ago

It actually first jumped significantly after the earnings call the day before the election.

A 54% growth on the commercial side, being added to the S&P500, 1b in free cash flow, etc. Since then there have been constant announcements of more success resulting in buy-ins from all the big institutional funds including sovereign wealth funds.

Sure, the political connections are there, but is that why everyone's buying?

https://www.palantir.com/q3-2024-letter/en/

rw2• 11 months ago

I think the future with AI has no room for Palantir.

Basically, their entire premise is go into some place, collect all the data and build models that are useful on top that data.

Those models are now pretty much useless in the age of LLMs as the LLMs are so powerful you dont need custom models to predict behavior anymore. The new meta in this space is probably someone taking all the data into some db and using LLM on it either through training or interpretation.

nazgulsenpai• 11 months ago

You can just look at their website -- it's surprisingly in depth even with their targeting systems and stuff. It's wild how open they are about it.

progbits2• 11 months ago

https://www.palantir.com/platforms/gotham/ ctrl-f "kill chain" and watch the video.

They have a fucking kanban board for bombing people.

geetee3• 11 months ago

I mean, let's be realistic.... should they just use an excel spreadsheet?

infecto5• 11 months ago

Is it that surprising? Ignoring war being good or bad, you would assume there needs to be some method to the madness. I assume before computers this meant a central com center that kept track of everything using humans and chalkboards or tables.

TheAlchemist3• 11 months ago

Is that surprising or bad ?

Sure war is bad and killing people is bad, but can we stop acting like it's a choice ? Unfortunately, wars will happen as long as humans exist and it's much better to be on the winning side. So yeah, there are a lot of people building dashboards for killing people and it's not necessarily bad. I would even argue that it's much better than a lot of people whose work is to make kids and adults addicted to screens.

araes• 11 months ago

This was actually surprisingly clear. This, and htrp's comment are much clearer than the entire noise article.

They make dashboards and apps for killing people. With a lot of technical jargon like "integrating disparate weapons and sensor systems for a kill chain".

Somebody in America says "we want to kill somebody" -> satellite gives real-time imagery on location -> weapons systems available nearby are recommended -> user clicks orders and telemetry go out to field operators and ex: drone systems -> predator fires up and flies to location and bombs target -> real-time imagery confirms explosion and results.

BLKNSLVR2• 11 months ago

Looks like they make pretty dashboards for action movies like Mission Impossible.

m463• 11 months ago

I think of MAD and how it creates peace.

In the same way, do people who do things to paint targets on their foreheads read this stuff, and think twice?

A lot of criminals are rational.

umeshunni• 11 months ago

You can just look at their website

Do you really expect journalists to do that? What's next - expecting them to travel to countries they're reporting on? It's not the 90s for gott's sake

dogman14412• 11 months ago

A helpful framework I’ve liked is

- Palantir was incredible technology during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for putting the proverbial warheads on foreheads of insurgents with terrible SIGINT practices and a lot of generated data. You could build and analyze graphs of insurgent networks that were tangibly powerful

- After that, in my mind what was very similar tech was sold to US domestic police, corporate insider threat teams, whatever. As I recall it had uneven adoption due to expense

- Now in 2025, that same tech is slated to have broad access to American citizen data under an entirely trustable and stable executive branch.

With those face value facts, a capable technical mind like those in hackernews could draw logical conclusions.

To put a pin in it - threat modeling for what you say and do online as this era progresses is interesting to consider. Now with tech like this, your threat model is now you + your friends. Who’s the “radical” in your friend group, and is the group chat on unencrypted systems? Consider what your graph would be, and how much do you trust tech like this ran by either the current team or the other team.

spencerflem• 11 months ago

dogman14412• 11 months ago

Military integration with law enforcement -> military tech licenses -> focus on cities -> cities have troves of SIGINT

Unencrypted group chat -> one friend hates one party -> another friend loves to talk about illegal habits -> tool hoovering it all up -> illegal habits friend is the pretext to look at politics friend

Clear as day, as this is what caused a bad time for insurgents in an actual war. Makes a lot of sense to apply it domestically! Tread on me.

jimt1234• 11 months ago

Apparently crime only happens in big cities. It's weird, because where I grew up in rural Missouri, every-other dipshit was a meth junkie, robbing houses to support their addiction. But, well, maybe I just invented all that with my crazy imagination.

tempodox2• 11 months ago

IOW, they facilitate killing people. Got it.

dogman14412• 11 months ago

And facilitated it well. And now US fed law enforcement likely will have it.

artursapek• 11 months ago

b2g software (body to ground)

culi• 11 months ago

killing and surveilling

jonstewart2• 11 months ago

“Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department, says Werner von Braun.”

themafia• 11 months ago

Yea, but with a cool modern spin on it, it's not imperialism it's fighting terrorism!

Still not clear on how murdering the poorest people in the world with the least reach of anyone on the planet with devastating weapons like the R-9X missile, which has been described as a "samurai sword warhead" because it uses bladed protrusions to penetrate and then mangle it's victims, has solved anything. Other than putting loads of money in Palantir and Raytheon's pockets.

I think these days though they just sell political influence since Trumps brand of populism has made war _slightly_ less popular than it was 10 years ago.

saint_yossarian• 11 months ago

They literally advertise a "AI-powered kill chain". See https://www.palantir.com/platforms/gotham/

OJFord• 11 months ago

Isle of Wight? What's 'IOW', 'inside of war' or something?

LearnYouALisp3• 11 months ago

...incredible technology during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
- Now in 2025, that same tech is slated to have broad access to American citizen data

Speaking of which, only loosely-related, but is there any indication of where the 'recent' leak of British special forces, contractors and/or informants (?) happened? (est. 2022, discovered later, now in news)

incone123• 11 months ago

News reported it was data getting passed around as a spreadsheet attached to emails. Ironically it would have been possible to build a case management tool with rbac on Palantir Foundry and avoid that screwup.

cookiengineer6• 11 months ago

Don't forget that Lavender AI, the "cool system" that automatically targets all Hamas fighters (with probably 1000% civilian casualties because it destroyed all hospitals, churches, mosques and schools along the way) was developed by Palantir.

The irony is that this really bad SIGINT graph flags also relatives, e.g. cousins of cousins of fighters, just because they had e.g. family events where they attended together, even though all other intelligence data would point to the contrary. The documentary that got banned from BBC highlights this with a lot of stories where e.g. hospital workers were specifically targeted because a distant relative was associated with hamas.

Palantir had a video on YouTube where they were even bragging about this graph, though not under its now-leaked codename.

stephen_g2• 11 months ago

Exactly what I remember reading all the time about the Afghanistan war - the OP calls the Palantir tool 'incredible technology' but the one thing I remember seeing reported time and time and time again during that war was reports of strikes against civilians accidentally being targeted because their mobile phones had been nearby to insurgents (like maybe having visited the same mosque or the same family gathering)...

nelox5• 11 months ago

The comment throws around impossible numbers and unverified claims as if they were facts. “1000% civilian casualties” is nonsense mathematically, and nothing backs it up. There is no public evidence the BBC “banned” the documentary, so that looks like hearsay.

Lavender AI is one lead-generation tool among several, with human analysts and other intelligence sources involved. It does not “automatically destroy” hospitals, churches or schools, that is an unfounded exaggeration. Many such sites remain standing, and damage in a war zone is not proof of an AI-driven targeting policy.

Social network mapping is used by counterterrorism agencies everywhere. Being on a graph does not mean you are on a kill list. Without solid data on actual misidentifications, repeating anecdotes does not prove the system works the way you claim.

ralop• 11 months ago

Palantir is extremely bad, but this not making the point you want to make. Hamas infamously wears civilian clothes during combat and operates out of civilian structures in civilian zones. We ought to oppose the destruction of democracy and the arrival of dystopia without defending terrorism.

tomlockwood• 11 months ago

It's funny (horrifying) coming from an advertising background - this sounds exactly like the tech that allows advertisers to take credit for conversions that are wildly unrelated to ads, in reality.

klooney• 11 months ago

destroyed all hospitals, churches, mosques and schools along the way

Hamas doesn't have an air force, and they're facing an enemy with a good air force and good intelligence. They can't have nice things like "zoning", if they stored rockets away from civilians they would all get destroyed.

So, in order to have rockets, they must be stored under targets that would cause political trouble if they were to be hit: hospitals, churches, mosques and schools.

Bombthecat• 11 months ago

This reminds of the phrase: you kill a terrorist, the terrorist died, you kill a terrorist and a family member, now you have 6 terrorists.

PicassoCTs• 11 months ago

Don't forget hamas, hiding behind hospitals, churches, mosques and schools makes those valid targets. And it could quit islamo-facism any day of the week!

Analemma_• 11 months ago

That "incredible" tech didn't seem to help all that much in Afghanistan. Not only did the US lose, I never got the sense we were even particularly close to winning, even if we'd stayed there for another 20 years and trillion dollars. In terms of tangible wins, what was Palantir's "incredible" tech actually delivering?

dogman14412• 11 months ago

It delivered two things, and the easy response to your fair point is tactical tools — a rifle, great software — don’t win wars on their own.

1) Palantir was the first breath of fresh air that brought actually good tech with modern tech support practices to the warfighter, and by extension put the big defense contractors on notice. I personally believe this impact was tremendously important as there were real safety connotations involved, and anyone with a family member downrange could appreciate this.

2) Palantir was great targeting software that worked like modern tech vs a custom Linux distro with a GUI from 1970 and required 5 months of finagling to get vendor support for.

So Palantir just brought standard 2010’s tech to soldiers betting their safety on it. This was incredible although ordinary.

goodluckchuck• 11 months ago

It sounds like you’re judging by the political outcomes, and frankly the tactical effectiveness is pretty far disconnected from that. It’s like saying a Chef’s knife must be dull because the meal tastes bad.

ineedaj0b2• 11 months ago

there's lots of near admission by numerous service members (retired now) who go on those war/special forces podcasts and admit they had their hands tied and told to stall. the 'brass' didn't want the war to end - unclear if it was the presidents of the time or the generals but we accomplished the mission those in charge wanted (forever war).

GoatInGrey• 11 months ago

On the contrary, the US-led coalition achieved military victory in Afghanistan in under 60 days. Which is an incredible feat. Though what that coalition failed to achieve, and where people try to adjust the definition of tactical victory, was the nation-building goal of creating a functional, independent Afghanistan government. The counterinsurgency aspect was the process of protecting that fledgling "nation".

The very uncomfortable truth here is that Israel is demonstrating how to effectively destroy insurgencies in Gaza and Lebanon. You cannot pussyfoot with nasty, brutal tactics and expect to accomplish anything. This was a lesson the west learned in the world wars, and we seem to have collectively forgot it again.

ml-anon• 11 months ago

“Putting the warheads on foreheads”

Who the fuck talks like this, seriously?

vkou• 11 months ago

People who inflict war on others and their families, but have never had war inflicted on them and theirs.

BLKNSLVR2• 11 months ago

Pete Hegseth

dogman14412• 11 months ago

You’d be surprised

hybrid_study• 11 months ago

sociopaths

jonstewart2• 11 months ago

Any/everyone who was part of GWOT. It was a common saying in those circles in 2010.

narrator• 11 months ago

People who enjoy being in military combat and talk about it like it's their golf game.

Natfan• 11 months ago

some USMIL goon

lisbbb2• 11 months ago

My take is that nearly all military technology, particularly mass surveillance tech, will be applied to the civilian sector eventually. That's why everyone using China as the baseline for human rights worldwide is so terrifying.

As far as Palantir goes, they're just another in a long line of corporations that sell such services to the government. Ever heard of RAND Corp? They undertook all kinds of weird studies during the Vietnam era.

So please, spare me the concealed distaste for the current Administration, as if the previous one was some kind of wonder for America! The left is, on the whole, far more totalitarian than the right in the US. I sleep better knowing our borders are secure, racist or not. I also sleep better knowing that criminals are getting locked up once again--that's an important aspect of even having and maintaining civilization! It's such a simple concept, yet many of you ignore it or misunderstand it or something.

Anyways, if Palantir was anything special, the war in Afghanistan would have turned out much differently. They failed to predict that the Afghan government and military would completely collapse the instant Uncle Sam stopped paying the bills there. It was all a giant scam.

HSO• 11 months ago

Ah the imperial boomerang

tarsinge• 11 months ago

I heard in reality there was no "tech" but very good PR for consultants ("forward deployed engineers" I think their term was) doing standard data engineering?

cyanydeez• 11 months ago

They're mckinsey but for nazis

adamnemecek• 11 months ago

Palantir is a FAAS, fascism-as-a-service provider.

LAC-Tech3• 11 months ago

What kind of fascists are they?

saagarjha4• 11 months ago

Does it matter?

lenerdenator2• 11 months ago

They track you, and not to sell you stuff.

DesiLurker• 11 months ago

but to sell you as serfs.

jihadjihad2• 11 months ago

Wasn't there a blog post on HN a while back from someone who worked there early on in their career, where they traveled around and built a bunch of tools to help manage data etc.? I thought it was an interesting lens to look through. Can't recall the post, though.

asveikau2• 11 months ago

It made it sound like what they did is drop ship into a company, destroy all their existing procedures, and rush through a half assed piece of software to replace them.

It sounded a lot like the DOGE playbook. From that vantage point I became skeptical that they did anything good for their clients. It's like "douchebag outsourcing consultant as a service".

Temporary_313373• 11 months ago

FWIW, I am in a project like this where we a re given free will to use whatever it takes to deliver quickly and ignore the company internal procedures etc - we're using agile as it should be done (principles not just verbiage) so for example we don't have meetings unless needed etc. Needless to say we've shipped our first product a few months back and now it's v2 and now some of the team is moving on to other areas. Disruption can be good you know....

FergusArgyll2• 11 months ago

This one?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44785708

kherud• 11 months ago

It's probably "Reflections on Palantir" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41855006

xdfgh1112• 11 months ago

I know someone who worked there and their job was helping customers load their data into it, often with strict security. It was pretty boring and then palantir just exposed a UI that joined that data and made it analysable and mappable.

mieubrisse2• 11 months ago

I think you're looking for this: https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir

I worked there for 7y, and can confirm Nabeel's post is very accurate.

The general public thinks Palantir's a bunch of moral-less folks grinning over godlike power & privacy violations but in actuality it's a mashup of smart Silicon Valley + military folks trying to make data pipelines & analysis work around the globe, often in achingly bureaucratic organizations.

Fomite• 11 months ago

"Evil"

AtNightWeCode• 11 months ago

They aggregate data and use it to hurt people. They use Facebook data for instance. If they collected the data or a "customer" did it does not really matter to me at least.

dboreham• 11 months ago

Folks here were likely mostly not born yet, but note the beginnings of internet search (not Google iirc) were defense surveillance projects. Basically when the internet took off at the retail level anyone that had been working on black mass surveillance projects flipped over to working on internet search. Same for internet map/google earth type systems. I saw a google-earth-like product demonstrated (possibly wasn't supposed to see it at the time) in 1989.

owlninja• 11 months ago

I was surprised to hear the name Palantir being thrown around where I work (manufacturing company) and I looked it up and they have something called 'Foundry' for shop floors. Reading the other comments here plus seeing that makes me just see them as another consulting company that wants to get its claws in you and then actually start building the things they advertise at an incredibly high price. They have some skills and want to just get into business wherever there is a business. The demo was certainly slick but very short on specifics, and the sales people seemed top notch (you know the type).

diogenes_atx• 11 months ago

Palantir's business operations are not a secret, despite the company's latest efforts at obfuscation. In fact, there is a recent academic study about Palantir and the surveillance data industry:

Sarah Brayne (2020) Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press

https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Pol...

According to the book, Palantir is one of the largest companies specializing in surveillance data management services for clients in the U.S. military, law enforcement and other corporations. Palantir does not own its data but rather provides an interface that runs on top of other data systems, including legacy systems, making it possible to link data points across separate systems. Palantir gathers its data primarily from "data brokerage firms," including LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters CLEAR, Acxiom, CoreLogic, Cambridge Analytica, Datalogix, Epsilon, Accurint. As Brayne observes, these data brokerage firms "collect and aggregate information from public records and private sources, e.g., drivers licenses, mortgages, social media, retail loyalty card purchases, professional credentials, charities’ donor lists, bankruptcies, payday lenders, warranty registrations, wireless access points at hotels and retailers, phone service providers, Google searches and maps geolocation, and other sources who sell your data to customers willing to pay for it. Yet it is difficult to fully understand the scope of the data brokerage industry: even the FTC cannot find out exactly where the data brokers get their information because brokerages cite trade secrecy as an excuse to not divulge their sources" (pp. 24-5, 41-2).

Why is this a concern for people living in a democratic society with a supposedly strong legal system that protects individual freedoms? "Big data companies argue that their proprietary algorithms and data are trade secrets, and therefore they refuse to disclose their data, code and techniques with criminal defense attorneys or the public" (p. 135). This means that, "In many cases it is simply easier for law enforcement to purchase data from private firms than to rely on in-house data because there are fewer constitutional protections, reporting requirements and appellate checks on private sector surveillance and data collection, which enables police to circumvent privacy laws" (pp. 24-5).

tgma• 11 months ago

If they can't explain what the product is, it is because they are effectively selling custom high margin consulting services anchored on a data pipeline product. This is not too dissimilar from Oracle, et al, that sell "solutions," "support," and "services" anchored on a not-so-special database product.

But that's not sexy for recruitment and the VC investment math does not/did not like to hear the word consulting, so they lipstick the pig and sell depth-first search as some secret voodoo magic.

uoaei• 11 months ago

It's "just" a "knowledge hypergraph" that combines natural resources, logistics, and social relations that can track the dynamics of basically any effort or enterprise. It's as simple and as complicated as that.

vaylian• 11 months ago

But a number of former Palantir employees tell WIRED they believe the public still largely misunderstands what the company actually does and how its software works.

Those employees are just in denial.

verisimi• 11 months ago

“It's a really powerful tool,” says one former Palantir employee. “And when it's in the wrong hands, it can be really dangerous. And I think people should be really scared about it.”

There are 'right hands' apparently.

6510• 11 months ago

It's hard to keep up with the convo here if you aren't paid by the post for polishing a turd.

That said, it's quite an accomplishment how people in the US are conditioned to be fine with spending many many trillions to murder random people everywhere with no real goal or purpose.

cess11• 11 months ago

They're the Computing-Tabulating-Recording, International Business Machines, Company of our age, and just as they did in the thirties and forties, Palantir shapes contemporary tyranny and genocide.

While the predecessors arguably chased profit for its own sake, this is not the case with top Palantir leadership, who have very loudly declared their political ambitions and wallow openly in the nastiest of criminality.

Now, that's not a good sales pitch, and neither would 'we will collapse complexity in your decision making while providing abstractions that add to plausible deniability, and hence make you more efficient at doing crimes while at the same time make it feel more boring to the people that actually do the things'.

Hence the 'we fight for the Western civilisation against the barbarism of the world' branding, tuned to make NATO military personnel feel more or less at home. This is also why the Palantir employees don't have a solid idea about what they do, the same muddying about purpose through abstractions and cult like techniques are what keep them around.

stevezsa8• 11 months ago

I interviewed at Palantir London about 10 years ago.

I am based in Europe and one of the younger interviewers let-slip that they will all be working during the local public holiday. lols. No thanks.

Also, I grew up in a mixed ethnic environment. For the last few decades there has been a focus on trying to make society more inclusive. Such that my school exam papers would have questions like "Susan has 6 apples and gets 6 more. How many does she have" or "Rohit is travelling at 50mph ...." So a variety of names and genders etc to reflect the people who live here.

Well, my Palantir interview information was about "networks of people that need to be tracked"... all Muhammads, Omars etc. These names were my school colleagues and friends, so this didn't sit well with me (just to be clear, I didn't want to work somewhere that seemed to be making software to track entire groups of people).

They really should have sanitised their material and made it about helping Susan and Rohit track financial crime or some such. Instead I got vibes of that tv show Homeland.

brnt• 11 months ago

They really should have sanitised their material

No they shouldn't. I prefer seeing the beast as it is, not as how it would like to be seen.

adrianN• 11 months ago

You do in fact see it as it would like to be seen. You’re just not part of the group that they are marketing to.

Temporary_313373• 11 months ago

I'm curious what names did you expect for an intelligence op in Afghanistan or Iran? Generally the police take care of things like financial crimes, so not sure why you expected this from a service provider to US three letter agencies

karol• 11 months ago

He said he expected Susan;)

petesergeant• 11 months ago

Cynically, it sounds like their interview process worked pretty well for selecting people who were quite happy to work public holidays and had no issue with tracking "people that need to be tracked"

integralid• 11 months ago

I don't think cynicism is even needed. Public holidays are surprising - there's no legal way in Europe[1] to force someone to work during a holiday. And trying is a lawsuit waiting to happen. But tracking Muhammads? If someone has moral problems with that, they better resign before being employed. Because at best they will resign soon after joining, at worst they will become a whistleblower.

[1] I know Europe is big etc, but I used to work in UK on particular and everyone took bank holidays seriously.

Yeul2• 11 months ago

The Netherlands is a culturally diverse country and there are plenty of people willing to work on Christmas!

igleria• 11 months ago

Well, my Palantir interview information was about "networks of people that need to be tracked"... all Muhammads, Omars etc.

I can't begin to describe how sick this makes me feel. At the same time, I'm happy that your upbringing resulted in you making the right choice of not pursuing such a horrible company.

I on the other hand was contacted by Helsing, which at the time sounded cool to me (????) (secret agent vibes???). The recruiter however failed to appear at the screening call 2 or 3 times, which I interpreted as a strategy on their part to select for persistence/yes-men (Occam's razor on the other hand is that the recruiter was overworked and/or shitty).

I told the recruiter off.

Only after a while I realized that it really, really was not a good thing that I even considered working for a company that in the end just kills people for money (I know, european defense yadda yadda). I have enough trouble sleeping as it is.

robertkoss2• 11 months ago

I dont get it. Foundrys documentation is completely public, you can even sign up for the dev tier and try it out. It is not secretive at all. If there is one word to describe their products it would be ontology and literally no one has mentioned that.

And even on Gotham there is countless footage etc. on Gaia, Dossier, Meta Constellation etc.

They had to disclose this during the IDO, why are journalists just scratching the surface when discussing Palantir.

It is obviously a tech company that has a clever business model, deploying their engineers and PMs into the board room of Fortune500s and solving their problems.

Not trying to defend Palantir, but the journalistic work is just poor.

knallfrosch• 11 months ago

It's basically SAP/Oracle.

These match customer support, billing, warehouse inventory from data sources. You've got a rudimentary dashboard where you search for a customer and find his orders, address, phone number.

Gotham appears to be the same for the police. You search for an address and know whether you've been called to this address yesterday, who lives there, whether they have weapons..

But ultimately, it depends on what data sources you connect. Yesterday you tracked criminals, today you can track people to deport and tomorrow you track Jews. It's all up the user of the software.

robertkoss2• 11 months ago

its pretty obvious you have neither used foundry nor gotham.

mrkramer• 11 months ago

They offer "spying" services for your big data. Essentially something like Facebook and Google but without selling ads, instead spotting patterns that seem interesting for whatever reason.

rehman• 11 months ago

Palantir is an evil, unethical organization that profits from war and surveillance, full stop. Its products operationalize mass data collection into targeting and policing workflows, turning human lives into "pipeline metrics" and normalizing permanent war as a business model. The revenue comes from conflict, and the lock-in comes from embedding its engineers into institutions that can't easily rip it out. That's not "neutral tooling"-it's an incentive engine for more harm.

anentropic• 11 months ago

I'm still none the wiser after reading this waffle

What does Palantir actually do?

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